But maybe because I'm from a part of the country where there are more meth labs than drive-throughs, anything harder than cough syrup always makes me nervous.
To create a word is simple. But to create a world – to think – that’s hard.
In truth, it was also by design: as much as I loved my mother, she wasn't often the person I sought for comfort in hard times. She disapproved tacitly of crying.
Sometimes the best way out of darkness is into it.
People become so obsessed with the future, they make it up.
Language may have limits. But it isn’t just a dim likeness in a mirror. Yes, gestures, glances, touches, taps on walls mean something. So do silences. But sometimes the word is the thing. The bridge. Sometimes we only know what we feel once it’s ...
Words don’t always work. Sometimes they come up short. Conversations can lead to conflict. There are failures of diplomacy. Some differences, for all the talk in the world, remain irreconcilable. People make empty promises, go back on their word, s...
What if, right now, as we’re immolating language, we’re doing away with ourselves? Maybe we’ve regressed. The skills we once used for survival – scattered attention, diffuse concentration – have been adapted to finding glowing dots on scree...
Language also acts like love in form.
We both think love (and language) are interesting but taffylike diversions: soft, simple, perhaps a little salty. If either one takes over your life, you're an ass.
I think this had to do with the vintage of his family's money: the older the gold, the less shiny it tends to be.
Why do you think people stopped reading? We read to connect with other minds. But why read when you're busy writing, describing the fine-grained flotsam of your own life. Compulsively recording every morsel you eat, that you're cold, or, I don't know...
Words, then, are born of worlds. But they also take us places we can’t go: Constantinople and Mars, Valhalla, the Planet of the Apes. Language comes from what we’ve seen, touched, loved, lost. And it uses knowable things to give us glimpses of wh...
I wanted to do it once. Be a writer. Now I'm near 70, and the only thing I have to show for it is dictionary entries. Don't get me wrong -- I'm incredibly proud of it all. But let me say this, and I'll say it just once: don't fool yourself into think...
If there's something you really want in life - especially if it's something that scares you, or you think you don't deserve - you have to go after it and do it now. Or in not very long you'll be right: you won't deserve it.
Reflection can be its own reward.
